My trip to Taj Mahal and Aksardham

Prior to my trip to Gurgaon, I was thinking about visiting Tajmahal and Aksardham sometime during this trip itself. Yippie! I did manage to visit Tajmahal, Agra fort, Mathura (Birth place of Lord Krishna) and Aksardham in Delhi during the last weekend with Karuna. From Gurgaon, after calling lots of radio taxi cabs, I managed to get one and went to Noida on the Friday evening to Karunakaran’s place. Huh! Gurgaon has absolutely zero public transport and people rely on their own cars and cabs for everything. Taxi guys charge like hell and you need to wait for 45 minutes to 1 hour atleast when you call and book a cab. Uff!! .. Karuna is my schoolmate and it felt good to meet him after almost 9years. After catching up with Trapty (x-colleauge in Infy) and her hubby Vishal for dinner in Noida, I crashed at Karuna’s place that night.

We started at 5 am from Noida to our day tour bus pick up point in Delhi. While we were waiting for our tour bus in the cold, we made ourselves warm with the fire lit with wood outside the tea stall there and sipped hot chai. After almost 4.5 hours of journey in the heavy traffic roads, we reached Agra Fort at 12.15pm. Agra Fort isn’t that great but it has great view point to view Tajmahal which is just couple of kms away from there on the banks of Yamuna river. I bought myself a marble Taj souvenir and small marble statues for my home at a cottage industry stop. I also got a glimpse of first Taj mahal model made before actual Taj was built, in that cottage industry. This model was supposed to be designed by four architects at a cost of 7 lakhs and it took 4 years for them to show the model to Shah Jahan. Then we reached Taj Mahal around 3.45pm and after long wait in the ticket counter and entry queue, I was finally in front of Tajmahal..


My very first expression on seeing Taj was ‘OMG! Taj is just so beautiful’. I just could not take my eyes off of Taj mahal as it is so stunning. The efforts of 20000 odd workers for 22 years to build Tajmahal truly shows. No wonder, it was listed as one of the 7 wonders of the world’. After we clicked some pics and captured few video clips there, we started to Mathura. At 8pm we entered the Mathura temple which is the birth place of Lord Krishna and this is where the main Janmastami celebrations are done and telecasted from, every year. The temple has tight military security all around and stern security check in the entry. Mathura is famous for 3 things. The Krishna temple, Tulsi malas and Mathura Petha (Sweet). It was almost 2.45 am when we reached our room in Noida after the tiring trip.

On Sunday, I started with Karuna around 1pm on bike to Aksardham. I was actually excited to click some pictures and videos inside Aksardham but was taken by surprise once I entered Aksardham as I had to keep my bag, mobile phones, camera and digicam in locker. After tight security check we entered Aksardham. Aksardham is so big and is absolutely awesome. The architecture is truly stunning and I could not believe that most of the statues and sculptures inside were hand carved. If anyone is going to Aksardham in future, please don’t miss the Exhibition and musical fountain inside. Exhibition will take around 2 hours including an hour waiting time but it is worth every bit of it. It includes 50 minutes of Animatronics show of Swami Laxmi Narayan life, 45 minutes movie on giant IMAX screen and 15 minutes of boat ride inside, where you will get to see the amazingly realistic statue settings done to visually show the achievements made by famous historians of India. Unfortunately the Main Aksardham mandir was closed as some maintenance was going on. There is also a visually entertaining musical fountain show of around 20 minutes around 6.30pm inside. With satisfaction of visiting amazing places, I started back to Gurgaon on that Sunday late evening. I am gonna cherish these moments for really long time.